The Obama Wobble: Real or Media Invention?

As Barack Obama prepares for a holiday weekend with his family, the campaign hack pack has a message for him: Get your act together, buddy, before it’s too late! Just a few weeks ago, the conventional wisdom was that the President was virtually unbeatable: game over. Now many media savants and political insiders have spotted an alarming wobble in his victory march back to the Oval Office. “Obama Stumbles Out of Gate,” blared a Friday morning headline on Politico, home base for political junkies of all stripes.

Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei wrote that just three weeks after the President formally kicked off his reëlection campaign,

Obama, not Mitt Romney, is the one with the muddled message—and the one who often comes across as baldly political. Obama, not Romney, is the one facing blowback from his own party on the central issue of the campaign so far—Romney’s history with Bain Capital. And most remarkably, Obama, not Romney, is the one falling behind in fundraising. To top it off, Vice President Joe Biden has looked more like a distraction this month than the potent working-class weapon Obama needs him to be.

We are rapidly approaching the moment at which Washington reevaluates the Obama campaign’s reputation for competence and expertise. Every week, one or several of Obama’s surrogates trip over their own words…. One gaffe is an isolated event. Two is an embarrassment. But three or more form a pattern, one that is damaging not only Obama’s precarious chances for reelection but also the fortunes of the Democratic Party.

Perhaps. In attempting to rally the base and raise money, Obama has moved from one issue to another over the past few weeks. Surely, he needs to articulate a clearer vision of where he intends to take the country and how he intends to kick-start a slowing economy. But just because Joe Biden can’t keep quiet and Cory Booker and Steve Rattner object to attacks on Romney’s record at Bain Capital, it doesn’t mean that Obama’s campaign is imploding. Biden is Biden. Seizing an early opportunity to try and define the presumptive G.O.P. candidate as an out-of-touch rich guy makes strategic sense—even if it causes some dissension in the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party.

Much of what is happening in the media has nothing to do with the President’s I.Q., or with poor old Joe Biden, or with the missteps of David Axelrod, Jim Messina, and the rest of Obama’s campaign Rottweilers out in Chicago. It is about commentators catching up with the polling numbers and the economic data, which have been indicating for some time that this is going to be a very close race. Having largely written off Romney’s chances in the first few months of this year, the pundits now have to explain why he is suddenly leading Obama in some polls and running very close in others. One obvious, but not necessarily accurate, explanation is that Obama is screwing up.

I ran through some polling data last week. Several surveys published this week confirm it is a dangerous time to be running for reëlection. According to TPM’s poll tracker, almost two thirds of Americans still believe the country is on the wrong track, and according to the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, more than four in five voters think the economy isn’t in good shape. Just sixteen per cent of respondents said they personally are better off than when Obama took office: thirty per cent say they are in worse shape.

In circumstances such as these, virtually any incumbent would be facing a tough reëlection race, and Obama is no exception. For several months, though, the internecine warfare of the G.O.P. primary and a sharp drop in the unemployment rate, which raised hopes that the economic slump might finally be coming to an end, obscured the picture. It is the fading of these factors, rather than any major stumbles on Team Obama’s part, that explain why Mitt Romney is smiling these days.

The Politico story gives Romney credit for focussing on the economy and playing to his strengths, but that is nothing new. He has been trying to do that all along. A few months back, when the unemployment rate was falling and things appeared to be looking up, his message that Obama doesn’t know what he is doing didn’t resonate. Now it does—even though, as I pointed out yesterday, much of what he is saying is guff. Fifty-five per cent of respondents to the ABC News/WaPo poll said they disapprove of the President’s handling of the economy—a finding that is mirrored consistently in other surveys.

Attacking Romney’s record at Bain Capital will serve to reinforce doubts about his job-creation skills. But they won’t do much to change people’s opinions of the President’s competence as an economic manager. On this front, the critics of his campaign have a point. Rather than simply targeting Romney, the White House needs to be much more forceful in defending its economic record over the past few years, and in laying out proposals to create more jobs. A good place to start would be the American Jobs Act of 2011, large parts of which the Republicans in Congress refused to pass. Here’s a little example the President should be emphasizing in speeches and campaign ads: if the G.O.P. had enacted the whole of the package, tens of thousands of teachers who were laid off by cash-strapped states would still have their positions.

All sides agree that the election will come down to the economy. If Obama pushes a coherent message on jobs and prosperity, one that combines a critique of Romney and the G.O.P. with a positive vision for his second term, the odd slipup here or there won’t matter very much—not nearly as much as how the next few months of economic statistics come in. Most voters don’t read Politico, or TPM, or follow Twitter all day. They will judge Obama based upon their overall impression of his record, and on the basis of how much they trust him compared to his rival.

On the latter point, the latest polls contain some encouraging news for the President. Americans, skeptical as they are about what he has achieved, don’t necessarily believe that the Mittster would do better. Here are two questions from the ABC News/WaPo poll:

Q: Regardless of who you support, which candidate do you trust to do a better job handling the economy?

A: Obama: 46%, Romney: 47%

Q: Regardless of who you support, which candidate do you trust to do a better job creating jobs?

A: Obama: 47%, Romney 44%

It’s basically a tie. On the key issue of the race, neither candidate has the upper hand. As summer beckons, that is the real headline of the day. But, of course, it’s a lot more fun to write about campaign blunders, internal squabbling, and the rest.